The present invention relates to searching electronic documents and, in particular, to techniques for searching such documents for future events.
Humans have always wanted to know their future, resorting to religious texts, astrology, fortune tellers, etc. Although we cannot know the future, a lot can be predicted about it because many things are planned several years in advance.
The expression “searching the future” has been used recently for what is called prospective search. For example, in a publish/subscribe model, people can subscribe to topics of interest (sometimes expressed as queries), which then are matched to any new published information. That is, as new information relating to a topic of interest is published, the subscriber is notified in some way. For example, www.pubsub.com offers this service for over 13 million sources. Unfortunately, such models are inadequate to be applied in a predictive fashion. That is, such techniques merely apply conventional search techniques at various future times to obtain results. They are not intended to mine existing data with regard to upcoming events.
In view of the foregoing, techniques are needed for enabling the searching of electronic documents for future events.